Russian Jews are both reassured and worried by the events in Moscow, in which President Boris Yeltsin appears to have prevailed against his recalcitrant Parliament.
Reassured, because the outcome of Monday’s battle, in which dozens of people were killed, put Yeltsin clearly in charge once again.
But worried, too, because the opposition forces demonstrated more clearly than ever their anti-Semitic nature.
“There’s immediate concern about the actions of people who lost, but an optimistic view about Russia in the long run,” said Martin Horwitz.
Horwitz is program director of the Jewish Community Development Fund, a joint project of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Moriah Fund aimed at strengthening the Jewish communities in the republics of the former Soviet Union.
He said that fear that the opposition may now “vent their anger on unprotected people” was expressed in the words of a fax sent by the Herald Light Center, a Jewish group in St. Petersburg.
The confrontation began when Yeltsin dissolved Parliament on Sept. 21 and hard-line parliamentarians holed up in the Parliament building rather than heed his call for new elections.
Arkady Dubnov, a journalist for the Moscow-based New Times, described the deep anti-Semitism of Yeltsin’s defeated opponents.
“The opposition calls those who try to bring democracy to Russia either Jews or people ‘bought’ by Jews. Therefore, even the short-lived victory of fascist and Communist forces demonstrates the possibility of pogroms against Jews,” Dubnov said in a statement released in Washington by the Union of Councils, an advocacy group for Jews in the Soviet successor states.
Dubnov also serves as director of the group’s Moscow Human Rights Bureau.
ARMED MEN THREATEN JEWS IN SYNAGOGUE
The tension felt by the Jewish community was highlighted Saturday night, when 20 armed men entered Moscow’s Choral Synagogue and voiced anti-Semitic threats.
Nobody was hurt, the synagogue’s Rabbi Adolph Shayevitch told Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, in a telephone conversation from Moscow.
Over the weekend, the Israeli Embassy in Moscow received many frantic calls from Jews seeking to leave, even as tourists.
But on Monday, Jewish Agency officials in Moscow reported that it was business as usual in their offices.
But with the calming of the situation, most observers expect only a modest upturn in immigration to Israel.
“How much, how high, we don’t know. We’ll have to see in the next couple of days, the next couple of weeks,” Chaim Chesler, a senior Jewish Agency official in Moscow, said in an interview with Israel Radio.
Horwitz explained that “for people sitting at their tables, who had almost decided for aliyah but not quite, this may push, so there may be a small upsurge. But for others, it means the country has made one more step toward a democratic society.”
“It will tend to solidify what people’s predilections already are,” said Pamela Cohen, president of the Union of Councils.
“The $64,000 question,” said an official with one Jewish organization, “is will the crushing of (opposition leader Alexander) Rutskoi kill and curb any opposition, or will it flare up as people say, ‘What is happening here, is this a democracy?'”
53 JEWS ESCAPE ABKHAZIAN CITY
This question is perhaps more pressing in the provinces far from Moscow, where Yeltsin’s control remains untested.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has been maintaining contact with representatives in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as outlying places like the Siberian city of Perm and the Volga River city of Saratov.
JDC President Milton Wolf instructed the JDC Moscow office to purchase medicines, to be distributed to area hospitals.
Richard Wexler, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, said in a statement that the organization “continues to carefully monitor the situation of Jews in the Russian Federation.”
He added that the organization is “particularly concerned because of the presence of anti-Semitic elements among those in opposition to the government.”
Meanwhile, 53 of the Jews remaining in the Georgian city of Sukhumi, which was captured by Abkhazian separatists last week, have made their way to Georgian-held territory, in preparation for immigration to Israel.
The operation in the Black Sea port was organized by the Israeli Embassy in Tbilisi, which negotiated the arrangements with the Georgian government and the Abkhazian authorities.
No more than 200 Jews were believed to have remained in Sukhumi at the time of its capture. One thousand had already made their way to Israel in recent months, and others have been located among the 13,000 refugees gathering in the Georgian capital and other cities.
The fall of Sukhumi, the Georgian government’s last stronghold in the Abkhazia region, marked a decisive defeat for the forces of Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, after 13 months of civil war.
(Contributing to this report was JTA correspondent Cynthia Mann in Jerusalem.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
